Improving Recognition and Character Model Silhouettes

Have you ever walked through the town of your choice — be it big cities like Stormwind or Orgrimmar, forlorn capital cities like the Exodar or Silvermoon, or little townships or camps like Nijel’s Point in Desolace or Desolation Hold in the Southern Barrens — and someone walked or flew by you and you recognized them instantly? Maybe you just read their name tag. Hopefully, though, you recognized them by their silhouette (maybe you are like me and have nameplates turned off for both ally and foe).

Silhouettes are an easy way to make an impression. Let’s do a little test, shall we? Here I took a few screenshots of WoW celebrities. Can you recognize all five of them?

Well, how many did you get right? Tell me in the comments. Now back to your regularly scheduled programme.

Of course, silhouettes are not the only way to be recognized. Mixing and matching colours for astonishing-looking armour sets is one of the most fun you can have with transmogrification. In fact, more so than a silhouette, colours make you stand out even more from the croud. If you look at any of the many fabulous transmogrification websites and blogs (Go Mog Yourself, for example) you will see that their primary concern is probably colour matching, not creating unique silhouettes. You can have the most interesting silhouette, and it will make a hell of an impression if you are far away or shrouded in mist or shadow. Once you step out of the shadow, however, you might not have the same impact on people. Or a completely different one:

What has all this to do with anything? Well, Blizzard has shown their tendency towards more asymmetrical armour sets and other little things lately. You just have to take a look at the Mists of Pandaria sets; almost none of those are symmetrical. Here is a quick example:

The upper image is the rogue challenge mode set in a golden tone. The two images below are what the set would look like if it was symmetrical either way. Now you might think “That’s not that bad? I don’t like any of them / I like all of them.” It doesn’t look like there’s much of a difference, does it? Well, let’s see what happens when we simplify these into silhouettes:

Sure, they still all look kinda cool and mysterious. But I would say that the upper image looks way more interesting than the lower two. Don’t you?

As you can see from this short example, an asymmetrical aspect on your armor makes your character quite a bit more interesting. Assymetry in your shoulders isn’t the only thing that can influence your silhouette and appearance. During the last BlizzCon, Blizzard have stated that they will try to make more armor pieces stand out on their own. The first thing we see the effect of this on are belts — belt buckles, specifically. Looking at a few of the new belts, we can see once more how they change your appearance. From the same set of armour as before:

Notice how the upper belt (the rogue Tier 13 belt) has absolutely no impact on your silhouette? Now compare this to the lower belt (the rogue challenge mode armour). What a difference!

Although Blizzard may have gone a bit overboard on the size of the belt buckles (who would wear a belt with a buckle that big? It would slow you down tremendously), it’s nice to see this change. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Imagine a world (of warcraft) in which every piece of your armour looked and behaved like it would in real life. That would be incredible. And nearly impossible to code, I would think.

But we don’t have to have it all in place perfectly. And not all at once. Belts and shoulder pieces are only the first steps into a less flat character silhouette and therefore, a more dynamic character appearance.

I asked on Twitter what some of your favourite armour sets were. Now let me entertain you with what some of these armour sets could look like on your characters. All I did was take screenshots from WoW Model Viewer and paint over them. You might not see much of a difference, but if you look closely, you might see a few surface changes. The red arrows and the few sketches from the side might help indicate changes, too. It’s not much, but it should give you an impression of what your character might look like if Blizzard keeps going in the interesting silhouette direction.

Edit: Maybe I should end on something like a disclaimer: while old armour sets are fun, I don’t think it’s feasible to expect Blizzard to retroactively change old armour sets to fit the “new” model. They would have to redo most of the sets completely. But if we arrive at the point where feathers stand out like feathers, plates are stacked on plates and cloth flows like cloth at SOME point, I’ll be really happy.

Preface: As I see this comment growing and growing, I realize that I maybe should have gone into possible problems and other aspects in the post itself. For now, though, I’m going to leave it at that. Maybe I’ll revisit it later. Who knows?

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Yay for you getting all 5 right! I intentionally chose those as they have fairly unique silhouettes (although I wanted to make it a bit more challenging with the orcs) and you don’t necessarily have to go to any raids to see them (even Kel’Thuzad has his little outdoor playground hovering in the Borean Tundra). But I still imagine there are going to be people having difficulties recognizing them. Hence the little ‘Dating Game’ hover text.

I’m really excited to see our new armour sets as well, especially once the designers get their crazy “this has to look Asian” over-the-top designs out of their systems. The longer they work on this Asian influence, the more subtle it can be, yet stay clear enough. At least I hope that’s where the development is going to end up.

The one big problem I see with the new things they come up with — and this is where the problem with my silhouette improvement suggestion lies as well — is that we might not be able to mix some of the new armour stuff with old armour sets.
You can already see this when you look at the improvements in texture across the expansions. When you look at, say, the Judgement set — very well-liked throughout the community — in isolation, it is awesome. The colours are ranging from black to orange and yellow, it looks very heroic and mysterious (hood!), and who didn’t envy paladins for their awesome tome-and-sword shoulders back in the day? (I know I did.)
Now, if you put the set next to the most recent paladin tier set, tier 13, the Judgement set suddenly looks less good. It looks flat, void of detail and the materials are off (the metal looks so much shinier on new armour). This effect is even more visible with some leather or cloth sets. Where in early sets you couldn’t tell if there were metal or wood pieces in the costume or if it was maybe embroidered into the cloth, more recent armour sets show that difference very clearly. Remember the druid tier 12 armour? Whether you liked it or not, you could tell that some parts of it were carved wood and scorched bark.

Now, if you try combining old and new armour pieces into one transmogrification set, you may run into problems for these exact reasons. It just looks weird.
If they continue down the road of making more armour pieces stand on their own (like they announced with belts), we might end up with a sort of divide in the sets you can combine safely. A pre-surface and a post-surface phase, if you will.

I’m sure Blizzard is contemplating this issue already, and I’m assuming they haven’t really come to a decision yet. Belts are, after all, more accessories than anything else, and a belt that stands out from the rest of your armour is less destructive to transmog sets than a pair of trousers not matching your shoulder pieces (for whatever reason).
If you’re looking for difference in your sets: great. If you, however, are looking for some unity throughout your set (and maybe have one or two pieces stand out by being different — like a belt for example), then mixing and matching pieces from past expansions with new stuff will get harder and harder as technology gets better.
Blizzard could fix the issue by retroactively fixing the old gear to fit the new (in the future) models, but this would mean a ton of work for them (which they would have to do all over once they make another jump in what’s possible). I would rather see them put these countless hours into new content. (This is also why re-hashing old content and using it as new stuff is problematic and gets old quite quickly, but that’s a topic for another day.)

TL;DR: I have no idea. There’s problems to any approach Blizzard might take in the future, as the new stuff doesn’t overwrite the old, but adds to it.